The parents summoned are in many instances dissolute or careless people, who utterly neglect their offspring, and take no pains to ensure their attending school, or they are crafty, cunning wretches, who see in the law a means of attaining a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Here is a woman who, when asked why her boy of nine has not been to school for a month, declares that he plays truant, and that he is quite beyond her control. Now, the result of such a complaint is, that the young gentleman will, if the parent reiterates in court her statement, be sent to a reformatory for five years.
That is just what the good lady wants. Her story is one that may be instructive if not edifying.
Two years ago her husband got ten years' penal servitude for a heavy fracture of his country's laws, leaving her with three children, two boys and a girl. There is a custom in such districts as that of which I write which shortens the period of mourning for a lost mate very considerably: Directly husband 'No. 1' gets forcibly removed from the domestic hearth, his place is almost invariably taken by another gentleman, who is 'master of the situation,' and locum tenons with full family honours.
I cannot resist telling a little story apropos of this domestic phase of slum life, which illustrates it rather forcibly. A little girl of eight at one of the schools near the Mint came one morning with a pair of boots on her little feet. This was the first pair of boots she had ever been seen in, and the unwonted magnificence naturally attracted attention.
'Why, Annie, you've got a pair of boots at last, then!' exclaimed the governess.
'Yes, mistress,' the child replied, glancing proudly at the battered, second-hand shoes, three times too large for her.
'And where did you get them?'
'One of my fathers gave 'em to me, mistress—the one what's at home this week.'
This 'father' was evidently a better fellow than most of the nomadic husbands who wander about from family circle to family circle, ready to replace its absent head at a moment's notice. He must have been more generous to another man's child than the 'husband' of the lady whose history I have so unceremoniously interrupted, and who wants her boy put away in a reformatory.